Year: <span>2015</span>

“I’d love to be a writer,” someone said to me the other day, “but I have no ideas on what to write about.” She seemed to think it was that simple: Just think of an idea…and write it. Nope. Guess again. Yes, a good idea is crucial to writing a book (or writing anything, for...

I’m sure it will come as no surprise to you that in my childhood one of my favorite presents—for Christmas, my birthday, or “just because”—was books. I absolutely devoured books, rereading my faves over and over, and pouncing on new books like a three-day-hungry feline on an unfortunate rodent. I still love books, only now...

I called up a pre-school the other day. I was looking to book myself in for a reading of one of my books. “What do you charge?” asked the woman at the other end of the line. “There’s no reading fee,” I answered. “I just want to be permitted to hand out slips of paper...

Is a picture truly worth 1000 words as they say? Or is a word worth 1000 pictures? Case # 1 (a lack of pictures): I was reading one of the stories in Tuck-In Tales to a group of kindergartners-1st graders-2nd graders. They clamored to see the pictures. I told them there were no pictures. A...

Lately I have been reading to the kids in an after-school program not too terribly far from my home. I go over there every week or 10 days or so. There’s no set schedule—the program supervisor and I put our heads together over the phone, consult our respective calendars, and work out dates that are...

What am I grateful for this Thanksgiving? Many things indeed, and of course not all of them are related to reading or writing. But plenty of them are: First above all, I am grateful for my God-given talent for writing (and editing). Without that ability, I don’t know what I would be doing for a...

A comment made online in the wake of the recent tragedy in Paris stated how very much the commenter wished to return to Paris—now more than ever. It made me stop and think. While surely nothing can take the place of a for-real trip to Paris—or Greece or the Himalayas or Fiji, or, closer to...

I had originally intended this week’s blogpost to revolve around cursive (script) writing, and whether or not it’s a lost art or should be taught in the schools. I will still touch on that subject, but my blogpost, like Topsy, “just growed,” at least in my head, as I was formulating it. Here is the...

My name will never go down next to Milton Berle’s in the annals of television, but I can honestly claim I was a sort of video pioneer.  No, I’m not talking about the two TV shows I hosted and produced in very recent years on a regular broadcast TV station in South Florida. I’m going...

Back before Google and Siri, when we had a question we needed—or simply wanted—answered, where did we go? What did we do? If we had an encyclopedia at home, we sometimes had to go no further. But not everyone owned a set of encyclopedias, and not every question was answerable by looking it up in...